Good morning. Hello. How are you? #729
Concert t-shirt woes, Cannonball Run, Biden's Pandemic Proclamations, Powell's a poopy head.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well. I hope so. The big question over here is what t-shirt to wear to this New Order show tomorrow. For, like, thirty years, the rule was very clear: you cannot wear a band’s own t-shirt to one of their shows. But it seems to me that that rule has crumbled in the last five years or so. People do it all the time now! Without shame! Is… this okay? I have been stubbornly, blindly holding out refusing to participate in this amoral sham. But maybe it’s me that’s the problem. Maybe I’ve been refusing to see that the tide has turned. It’s a new, more liberal era. I don’t want to be some hopeless old stick in the mud who can’t hang with the kids and change with the times. And I do have some pretty sweet New Order t-shirts.
I don’t know. Or maybe it’s safer not to play with fire. Maybe I should just wear something else. Definitely not a Joy Division shirt. That is still in poor taste, I think. Lotta people at the Spiritualized show were wearing Spacemen 3 shirts and I feel that this is just wrong. Though I’m not sure if it’s worse with Joy Division, a band no more because of a suicide, or with Spiritualized, a band no more because of drug-addled feuds. I suppose a Joy Division shirt could be seen as a tribute, and the band, at least, doesn’t hate the missing member.
It’s all too much. I can’t handle it.
Maybe I’ll wear a Swans t-shirt in a meta-meta-commentary on their cover of “Love will Tear Us Apart.” Or a Frente! t-shirt in a meta-commentary on their cover of “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Not that I own a Frenté t-shirt. Where can I get a Frente! t-shirt buy tomorrow. Whatever happened to Frente!? huh Frente! did a reunion tour in 2014.
Man I don’t know how you people just go out into public like it ain’t no thing. How did I used to do that every night? I didn’t even have nearly as good t-shirts back then.
In other news I re-watched Cannonball Run last night, and though the film came out in 1981, I feel like it really is peak 70’s. Decades always sorta start a few years late and run a few years long, you know. 1971 was really the 60’s, etc. etc. Anyway, damn, What a film. So utterly problematic in, like, fifteen different ways, the humor is, mostly, not funny (though one gag did still make me laugh out loud: “We’ve very close”). It still used sound effects on its sight gags, like “boinnnng!” Farah Fawcett’s pokies everywhere. Rampant racism and stereotyping. But the cast, my god. What a cast. In hindsight it’s really quite stunning how much of an influence this film had on me, I probably watched it on basic cable re-runs a hundred times. I really did think the open road was going to be filled with absurdly helpful truck drivers and marauding biker gangs lead by Peter Fonda.
Joe Biden told us Sunday that the pandemic was over and ain’t that a bunch of malarky. WTF Biden. I mean, I am sitting here looking at the graph of the number of COVID deaths, and it hasn’t budget since May. It’s actually up a bit since May. Five hundred or so people die of the disease every day still. But it’s just weird to me. If the pandemic is over now, was it over in May? Why didn’t you say that in May? Do 500 deaths a day not matter to you? And, just speaking tactically here, how wise was it to go on TV and declare the pandemic over when you’re trying to get another $25 billion or so out of the government for… the pandemic. Seems like maybe your bold pronouncement might, maybe, have an impact on the votes of more than a few republicans? What did you have to gain? What is it about the mid-terms that make people insane? “Oh I am going to take my constitutuency for granted and slowly turn into the person they want to vote against.” Coolbo. And right before when it gets cold! Why why why! I am sad, Joe Biden, you made me sad.
But not as sad as Jerome Powell who is going to kill us all in his slavish love of Paul Volcker’s recesssion-inducing ways. I mean at least Joe Biden isn’t Jimmy Carter and falling totally in love with balancing the budget and wanting to have a million babies with balancing the budget, thus assisting Volcker in throwing the country into a recession. But Jerome Powell is bumming me out. Here’s a good primer from Stephanie Kelton on it. tl;dr: Jerome Powell is the head of the Federal Reserve, who has a legislative dual mandate (actually triple, but we’re gonna fovus on two right now), not ranked, not one over the other, of reducing unemployment and inflation. But he has decided that inflation is more important than unemployment, completely against his legislative mandate, so he’s just going to raise interest rates, over and over, while acknowledging this will probablly tip us into a recession, because he is more butthurt over prices going up than he is about millions of people losing their jobs.
This fuckin guy. Cost of gas goes up a buck, the sky is falling. Putting ten million people out of work is just fine. I know I keep harping on this and no one cares but it is driving me mad.
The thing that rips me up the most is that there is still a very good chance that inflation right now is mostly the product of ahistorical, exogenous shocks: that is, it’s not some deep structural thing but it’s the economy still digesting and absorbing the shittery of the last few years. And there’s still a good chance that it’ll sort itself out on its own. Or, at least, with the assistance solely of far less bitter medicines. So we are looking at a situation here where Powell might just kick the economy into recession, while inflation sorts itself out on its own, no thanks to him, and then he will get credit for whipping inflation anyway, even though he did nothing that made an impact (because, fun fact, interest rate hikes take forever to tame inflation, only seem to do so when you go completely overboard, and its never happened without screwing the economy!)
And all of this would maybe okay if, you know, difference of opinion! I’m just some has-been ad guy and Jerome Powell is a Big Smart Man, and he knows better, raising interest rates won’t hurt unemployment, promise! But lol! Nope! Even he agrees it’s going to fuck up unemployment.
Fantastic.
Anyway.
I’ve decided what the world needs is a chain of suburban hotels with dive bars in the lobby, where people can all drive to, drink together, then go pass out in hotel rooms upstairs. Wouldn’t that be swell.
I guess this is why people have garage bars.
But dive bars!
When I build the indie rock retirement community, there will be a dive bar at the community center. Next to the coffee shop and book store and indie theater and small performance venue. Really gotta get on that we’re gonna start retiring in ten or fifteen years, Gen X, and it takes a while to build a retirement community. I imagine.
Justa mix today, old and new. Man The Creatures were great. I might love Creatures more than Siouxsie am I alone in this? That album came out at a very formative time in my life. We have a neighbor named Dana so “O, Dana” is often stuck in my head of walks. Pony is one of James Murphy’s pre-LCD bands and… it was pretty good? Desperate need of a re-master, though, sorry.
Hey you be careful out there. See you tomorrow.
I feel like the rule might be that it is ok to wear a band t-shirt that is like... over 20 years old. To show solidarity with the band and show the kids how cool you are?